


the stammering of human hearts

by Lacquiparle



Series: we love or we do not love each other [1]
Category: Broadchurch
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Magical Realism, Non-Linear Narrative, Re-upload, Speculative fiction, but the end is... happy?, the beginning is sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-11
Updated: 2020-08-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:47:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25788313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lacquiparle/pseuds/Lacquiparle
Summary: Miller and Hardy are brought together by the object that irks Hardy the most: his heart.
Relationships: Alec Hardy/Ellie Miller
Series: we love or we do not love each other [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2022854
Comments: 8
Kudos: 65





	the stammering of human hearts

**Author's Note:**

> “I realize that I love—you—by this: that you leave in me a wound that I do not want to replace.” From _The Post Card_ by Jacques Derrida
> 
> “He was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart.” From _Chronicle of a Death Foretold_ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

**Broadchurch. Present.**

The last time she sees him, the sky burns into the horizon like the world is set ablaze. Fire blossoming and tethered alongside a dirt road. The scent is of weathered memories that are suspended in time. 

She feels the agony, suddenly, in her heart.

They’re older now; her burdensome desire for retirement a cause for corked wine bottles gathering dust in their cottage. Over their table, she scans his face for when to bring the forbidden topic up again or when to open the cabinet for a Merlot and pry a smile from him despite the years. 

Fred dashes down the stairs, kisses his mother goodbye. The boy may be a teenager now, but that doesn’t mean he’s not soft hearted and congenial despite the ruddy cheeks and sturdy exterior that football produces. He calls Alec “Da” and hugs the man goodbye. 

Fred’s remembrances of his own father are minimal, unlike Tom who is away at university. Tom, a man now, who still toils with the trauma of the past and a biological identity he can’t run from. Tom who is tall and slim and calls on the weekends. 

_Don’t be late_ , Ellie must have said. She knows they’re having supper with Beth, her husband, and Lizzie, who are visiting from Norfolk. She must have warned Fred, leaning her head out the door. One final wave.

 _What is it_ , she asks, looking at Alec whose grimace on his face peels across his lips. He is gray around his mouth, but when she speaks to him, he turns away from her. _Alec_. His name suspends in time, a motion toward the past over fourteen-years ago when she didn’t know him, and she didn’t understand him. 

He gestures toward something in the air, his eyes glossy. 

She calls 999, but by the time the ambulance arrives, his pacemaker has already stopped. Ellie holds him close to her, whispering into his ear, telling him to hold on. His heart, always so verbose, goes silent. 

In the midst of her tears, she calls him every brutal insult can she think of. All in love. 

**Broadchurch. Fourteen years ago.**

The first time it happens, they’re at the Latimer’s barbeque. There are too many people for his comfort—Jocelyn, Maggie, Lucy, Nige, even Becca Fisher of all people, who looks at Paul frequently enough —they’re all there in close proximity. Everyone is chatting, passing drinks. Nige, Mark, and Paul are tossing a football around in the backyard. Several times, Maggie tries to corner Alec, but he attempts to stave her off until Lucy manages a conversation and a drink in the dark confines of a corner.

“Fancy seeing you here.” Her voice is a barely an audible whisper and she’s looking him up and down. He’s heard things about her—rumors—and he wants out of her ensnaring clutches immediately lest he becomes one of those rumors. 

He manages a grumble at the back of his throat and scurries away, practically sprinting up the stairs. 

He wanders around the house for a bit when Chloe finds him and asks if he’s okay. He imagines he looks frantic, or that whatever he just tore himself away from, has given him a spooked gaze in his eye. She’s a kind girl. Compassionate. She’s seen enough in her short life to understand innuendo. 

“Aye, just looking for the loo.”

It’s a lie and they both know it. She thankfully leads him to the toilet upstairs, away from everyone else and their marauding gazes. After Chloe trots back downstairs, Hardy looks around the Latimer home, thinking maybe he can calm himself down. He pokes around, pushing back a door. And there’s Miller holding wee Fred. Trying to get him to sleep, the boy stirs. A bit shocked, she looks up at Hardy who’s about to turn around, but then she smiles. She doesn’t smile much anymore, not since she’s come into her own revelatory experiences. He pities her, but he also understands. He was her once, too. That young copper with heartfelt zeal and the desire to do good, only for it to be compressed under life’s realities. 

Her smile is faint in the light, but it’s there and it’s for him. He’s so stunned by the gesture that he feels it, deep inside his chest.

A deep pulsation, as though his heart is going to scurry out of his chest. The rhythm skips, and the pulsation meanders off. He fears he will pass out. 

Suddenly, he’s grasping at his heart and trying to find the pill bottle in his blazer.

The first time it happened, he thought maybe it was an accident or he was dehydrated. That happened once before, but dehydration doesn’t affect electrical misfirings in the heart. At least that’s what his electrophysiologist told him. 

The second time it happens, SOCO Brian brings in new DNA evidence from the boat off the harbor. Fresh blood. He wants to discuss it with Miller, who is standing near her desk talking with Jenkinson. Miller’s drinking day old coffee and looks over at Hardy, mid-sentence. She puts a bit of hair behind her ear, stroking it lightly with her forefinger.

It’s the barbeque all over again, his heart pulses like a fox let loose in a hunt. Like the veins are tubuluar tendrils pulsating toward something or someone. 

Slumping, Hardy fingers for his pills somewhere in his jacket, heading toward the exit door. 

The heart, he realizes, has a mind of its own. 

He’s not sure what’s gotten into him of late. Any time he’s in the same vicinity as DS Miller and she does something, his heart starts acting strangely. Certainly, worse than before, or at least, more animate. The aorta constricts and the ventricles flutter like delicate wings, his capillaries tightening until he wonders if he will need yet another ablation. One, he thinks, was enough. 

It’s not like Miller ever listens to him, but if he looks at her, she’s not a bad looking woman. He likes how smartly and professionally she dresses. She smells nice. Once, he recalls as he sits on the bench overlooking the Dorset sea, she leaned over him and he got a whiff of vanilla and coconut. He remembers his heart doing _that_ after he inhaled her then. And her hair, well, he thinks peering over the pier, it would be nice if she let it down once in a while. 

Oh, his heart does have a lot of thoughts about her. 

“Whaddya doin?” He looks up to see a familiar orange parka walking toward him. He jumps and his ailing heart does the same. 

“Oh, nothing.” He speaks soothingly to his heart, telling it to remain calm under the circumstances. He feels for the pills for in his pocket, his forefinger circling the cap of the pill bottle. Foolish heart. 

“You ran out. I wanted to check on you.” 

“I’m fine. Just needed a bit of fresh air.” 

She sits beside him. “I didn’t think you liked fresh air.” 

He mimics laughing and he can feel his heart lurching a bit. She does smell nice. Very clean. His pulmonary valve pumps blood too swiftly at Miller’s pleasant scent and Hardy’s complexion changes. Why does the heart want what it wants? 

**Broadchurch. Ten years ago.**

Ellie knows that Hardy has always been a practical man, but hearts are curious things. For an organ that pulsates blood, it’s quite poetic. Mapping a terrain through the body.

In a tempest, Hardy and Ellie found their hearts aligned on a tepid summer day. 

That evening, Beth is to marry a newcomer to Broadchurch, their wedding small and intimate. They met through the crisis center two years ago, some time after Mark left Broadchurch to start his life over, some time after Beth and Mark’s divorced finalized. Chloe left for university and Lizzie is toddling. 

It all seems fitting, the wildflowers blooming alongside the country roads in Dorset. Spring arrives, then summer, and finally Broadchurch is returning to the life it knew before Danny died. 

Ellie is sitting at her desk, pressing a mug of coffee to her lips, reviewing the case file and any new evidence. Hardy is at his desk. It seems like they are always on the move. 

A young girl went missing a week ago after a party on the beach. Underage drinking. Illicit activity. The girl had broken up with her boyfriend days prior, but it does not seem like boyfriend is a suspect. 

Suddenly, Hardy is standing near Ellie. His heart is ticking in its alcove and he cannot help but stare down at her.

“Oh, god.” She jumps, clutching at her own healthy heart. “You gave me a fright.” 

“We never discussed tonight.” 

Ellie lets out a ballooned sigh, all the air that is retained inside her lungs, respired. “I thought you found some evidence on that poor Pearce girl.” 

Hardy doesn’t respond. He licks his lips instead, looking around CID and up at the ceiling. Looking for an excuse. 

“I have a childminder for Fred tonight if you’re that scared to go by yourself.” 

He stalls, makes grumbly noises, pinches his noise, does everything to avoid discussing the matter at hand. Ellie wonders why it must be so difficult for him, but then she remembers her own circumstances. She looks away from him and thinks about all the reasons why she could say no. 

Despite the pacemaker, Hardy can feel his heart tease him. Machine and man, the electrical pulses drone abnormal tempi until he catches Ellie’s faint smile to herself. More of a grin, he tells himself. 

“You’re such a knobhead.” She’s joking today. “I’ll pick you up at five. No hugging or touching.” She warns fiercely, the underlying _just friends_ understood. 

The ceremony is small, similar to Jocelyn and Maggie’s intimate ceremony a year prior, performed in the same church. A few words, a blessing, and dancing at the Traders until well past midnight. Ellie tells Hardy under her breath that she supposes second weddings under duress are like this. Trauma forces people together. 

Fred is running around, squealing. He’s old enough to know better, but the sugar is going straight to his bloodstream. He and Lizzie find a few other wees their age, sprinting hysterics thanks to the abnormal amount of sugar and love in the country air. Ellie determines that if she lets him run himself like this, he’ll sleep soundly, and she won’t have to worry about him waking up at the crack of dawn.

“He still does that?” Hardy asks.

“Only on the weekends.” 

Their relationship has progressed toward this level of sterility in the public domain, both fearful of others’ perceptions of their intentions. Not that Ellie is not aware of Hardy’s pleasant demeanor or Hardy doesn’t look at her from time to time and wonder. It isn’t that, so when Hardy asks if she wants to dance, she looks strangely up at him and asks if he’s out of his mind. 

He asks again, offering his hand like the gentleman that he is. 

“You are mad or you’re an arsehole.” She draws her jacket a bit closer around her shoulders and looks away from. Hardy mutters fine. He’ll ask Becca Fisher. 

As he draws Becca close, he can’t help looking at Ellie who looks right back at him. His heart speaks to her, but Ellie’s heart is mute. _Don’t touch me_. 

The drive back to the blue house is met in silence, neither Hardy nor Ellie wanting to bring up what happened or what wants to be inevitable. He gazes over at her, but in the darkness, Ellie averts her eyes and says something about the ceremony. It was nice or the flowers were pretty, or the new priest did a good job. Fred is sound asleep in the backseat, strapped in his safety seat. His head lolls to one side. 

“Ellie.” Alec’s voice is so gentle. He has been practicing a speech to her for some time, but he forgets all the words and intonations. He can feel the pacemaker throb drums deep inside his chest and he tells himself he can do this despite her bodily protestations. When she parks the car, a soft rain dusts the car, and Alec turns to her. She shifts her body away from him. 

“Ellie.” He says again. 

“I need to get Fred home and check on Tom.” 

Alec disjoints his body toward the back seat and looks at the sleeping boy. “Right.” But he’s not that easily persuaded, at least not this night. He’s had several glasses of wine.

He wants to say her name again, the name that he so vehemently disliked for so long and for so many reasons only for it to be forbidden to him. But he stops and sits for moment. “I think we both know that I can be a bit of an arsehole.” 

She unexpectedly laughs and he sees that she’s wiping away tears. Maybe he has a chance to pry away the rocky enclave that now surrounds itself around Ellie Miller. So, he tries and says the only thing that drifts wearily into his heart.

“I need you.” 

Ellie deliberately turns her eyes toward him, fearfully holding his gaze. There is a smattering of tears around her eyes and Hardy, without thinking, brushes them away. Ellie doesn’t stop him. 

Their first kiss is tentative, awkward, Hardy’s hands primly in his lap. Ellie reminds him that Fred is in the backseat, her arms stretch a course around his neck, and he sighs against her cheek. 

He will go in a moment, he tells her. They murmur their first lover’s causalities goodnight— _text me when you get home_ —until Ellie looks him in the eye but she doesn’t smile. She presses her lips against his and doesn’t kiss him. She just breathes deeply.

**Broadchurch. Four years ago.**

On his fifth wedding anniversary to Ellie, Hardy is stuck in traffic driving from London back to Broadchurch. His voice is controlled despite his frustration and anger, speaking into that antique Blackberry that periodically wails a piercing noise until it diffuses and dies. Fred jokes that its circulation unit is tied to Alec’s pacemaker. 

_Da, just get a new one_ , the lad says periodically, shy of his teen years and already on the outskirts of boyhood. 

_Maybe_ , Hardy says, but he’s no longer paying attention. He’s thinking about something else. What to get Ellie. He’s thinking about memories, too. 

That was days ago. Now Hardy is stuck in traffic, running his hand through his hair, frustrated that he won’t make it home on time to see Miller. She’ll be angry with him. 

_I told you not to go. I tell you all the time that you overwork yourself_. Her words sting in his ears. 

She was right, but he couldn’t tell her she was right or that she is routinely right. He slows the car to a dead stop, his head falling back against the seat rest. 

_You’ll go to London and then you won’t be back in time. You’re an arsehole. An absolute arsehole._

She was angry with him, eyes flashing at him analogous to days when he mistakenly stole her job. When he attempts to touch her, she calls him several choice words and storms off. 

He closes his eyes and thinks of her then. 

His heart contracts, and he feels the capillaries constrict until he can almost smell Ellie. He pushes a few buttons on the phone, it rings until he hears her familiar voicemail. She may not be picking up because she’s still angry with him or she’s busy. 

“Just thinking of you. I’ll be home soon.”

It doesn’t matter if it’s a fragment of a lie. 

When he finally arrives home, it’s well past midnight and he soundlessly unlocks and opens the front door. Fred is asleep on the couch, the telly still on assumedly from hours of mindless video games given the console near the couch. Hardy looks at the lad sleeping deeply before Hardy hikes up the stairs to the unknown in the bedroom.

She isn’t asleep. The soft glow of the lamp hovers over a book she’s reading, and she doesn’t look at him as she informs him that she’s still mad at him.

“About what?” He’s standing near the bed with something she hasn’t seen since she invited him over dinner so many years ago. Alec, Ellie long discovered, is a romantic. He’s not always the best with gifts, but he tries. Books, clothes, jewelry. If she alleged she wanted a puppy, he would probably get it for her. 

He’s standing near the bed with chocolates, wine, and flowers. She looks up at him with a confused look on her face. 

“Do you remember?” 

She stitches the memory together and groans. “Of course.” She doesn’t want to remember, at least not with the man she now loves standing near their bed on their anniversary. 

He sits beside her and consoles her. “Not for that reason, El. I was driving and thinking about how much we disliked each other…”

“Please stop while you’re ahead.” She kisses him. “I get it.” 

“I was also thinking about our first night together. The first time we made love.” 

“And how horrible you were.” Ellie sighs, thinking about how thoughtful Alec is, grabbing the chocolates and beginning to break open the plastic seal. An absolute fool, but her fool, she thinks as she grasps between the thoughtful layers of each gift.

Hardy pauses. Thankfully they’ve been together long enough now that he is beginning to know when to spar with her double-bladed tongue and when to back off. “It was uncomfortable for both of us. Let’s just agree.” 

Ellie chuckles, clearly winning the fight tonight, and stuffs a chocolate into her mouth. Hardy leans forward, kissing her lips, chocolate and all. When he pulls back, Ellie tells him she wants him to retire. “Take a desk job or something.” 

Hardy attempts to discern whatever is lurking behind her eyes, as if there is a premonition lurking there. 

“You know I can’t do that.” 

After they make love, Ellie rolls over into the crook of Hardy’s arm, tracing the familiar pattern constellated along his ribs, hair, freckles, and finally his heart. She pauses, intuiting the outline of his pacemaker. 

It senses her presence. Thumps once. Pauses. Hardy hasn’t had an arrythmia since his pacemaker surgery. He wraps his hand around Ellie’s hand, resting them together over that well-worn organ.

“Just think about what I said,” she breathes against his chest in the dark. 

**Broadchurch. One year ago.**

Shortly after their wedding, Beth and her new husband Adam move to Norwich in order to be closer to Chloe. And, as Beth tells Ellie in private, Broadchurch holds pain that will be too difficult to process and to repair. Too many memories. 

“Are you happy?” Ellie asks Beth, alone in Beth’s near empty kitchen. It’s another barbeque, the last one. Chloe, Daisy, and Tom are all home from university. They are chatting about their classes and Chloe’s new bloke. Fred explains Animal Crossing to Lizzie who later confesses to her mom that she doesn’t understand boys. 

_Your brother_ … but she stops herself. 

“Yeah,” Beth smiles to herself as if the thought dawns her. “I am. Adam is so different than Mark. He’s so good with Lizzie, too.” 

“Isn’t that funny how that happens?”

“Yeah, it is. Alec is like that with Fred, yeah?”

Ellie nods in agreement, but then a shadow crosses her face. She feels that age and infirmity are catching up with her and Hardy, especially now. The current case— three murders that appeared tied together around Dorset—are taking a toll on CID and on their marriage. She called Hardy’s cardiologist because he began experiencing an arrythmia again, but Hardy— _the absolute arsehole_ —cancelled. 

“Alec is great, don’t get me wrong, but he can be stubborn.” After Joe pleaded innocent for Danny’s murder and got off, her friendship with Beth was never quite the same. Didn’t hold the same vulnerability that years profited it. Apparently, time heals all wounds, except that the stitches holding the wounds together began to unravel and distress until one day Ellie felt she really didn’t know Beth anymore. Their friendship was an accommodation for spectacle. New people came into her life. People left. Alec, and her children, were the only constants. 

A moment comes for her to reach out and tell Beth everything, to open her heart, to bleed those wounds before her friend, but instead she bypasses for fear of uncertainty. 

“Who isn’t, though?” She chimes instead, a curtail of laughter ringing in her voice. She gives Beth a glimmer of the old Ellie, the Ellie Beth knew and loved, not the new Ellie. The damaged, broken Ellie with splintered edges. 

Beth wraps her arms around her old friend. “Keep in touch, yeah?” And Ellie promises she will. 

After they say their goodbyes, Ellie finds Hardy sitting on their familiar bench, a KitKat in his hand. He has aged almost unexpectedly but living along the coast has softened him with fine lines that wear him well. He smiles up at her. 

“Miller,” he says lovingly and hands her the KitKat.

“I’m not talking to you until you call the cardiologist.”

“I already told you. They will want to put in a new pacemaker and want are the chances of me surviving that surgery?”

Ellie stammers and looks away. Somehow, she always knew this conversation was coming, that it would interfere in the contrived life they had concocted for themselves once they gave in to each other. He had saved her and then what would she do once she had to say goodbye to him and their life together? 

He gets up from their bench and tries to hug her, but she pushes him and walks away. 

“Ellie.” 

He lets her be until he knows it’s safe to chase after her, and when he hugs her, she breathes him in so deeply her tears start and stutter from the emotional weight they carry. His heart will continue until it knows that final moment, when she is ready to say goodbye. 

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a reference to my favorite poet, Paul Celan.


End file.
